


Her Flowers to Love

by Mab (Mab_Browne)



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Community: spook_me, Episode Related, Spook Me Multi-Fandom Halloween Ficathon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-26
Updated: 2018-10-26
Packaged: 2019-08-07 18:46:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16413839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mab_Browne/pseuds/Mab
Summary: Tom calls her Nell, but Eleanor remembers when a young man called her Ellen.  A brief exploration of what Eleanor might understand or know of the events of Assignment Two.





	Her Flowers to Love

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Spook Me. Originally I planned to write something Sentinel, and I still will because it's a good story concept that popped into my head, but I needed longer than I had to do justice to it. As often happens with S&S stories, this concept has sat in the back of my mind for a long long time, and now it's out.
> 
> Everything I know about post WW2 UK village life I learned from books and Miss Marple tv adaptations, so I'm sorry for any errors of setting. I chose 1947 and an older Eleanor because Steel picks up an old paper in the episode that references that year.

She doesn’t often need to leave the village, to use the railway station; but whenever she does she always spares a thought for Sam. Poor Sam Pearce, dead nearly thirty years, and another war barely ended after that war that was supposed to end all wars.

She doesn’t need to leave the village today but Tom asked, “Pick up that parcel after school for me, will you, Nell?” She likes the pet-name, she loves Tom, but every now and again she remembers a young man calling her Ellen. She was hardly young even then, an old maid past thirty with her only children (still the only children she ever had) the ones she taught at the school. But, Sam… Sam gave her name the same delight and wonder as he gave the birds and flowers.

She wheels her bike along the platform, past the tubs of flowers that are the station-master’s pride. Geraniums and daisies, lifting their vibrant faces to the sun. Pink and white and gold, and the sky blue and white.

She feels cold. Sun’s gone in, she thinks before she sways. The handlebars of the bike slip away, and everything loses colour, except for the blue. There’s nothing but blue in her eyes. She stares into it as it stares into her and something takes her hand, a shadow cast by the blue, a woman with blonde hair. “We need you,” it says. “Don’t be frightened.” Eleanor’s frightened anyway as she’s dragged willy-nilly through void until the blue overtakes everything and she opens her eyes.

She barely recognises the station – dusty and unkempt, and filled with the whisper and skitter of something that’s not mice. Not even rats. Something dark that doesn’t belong. But then neither does she belong, not here or now, nor that by the table, grey and sharp and casting a shadow that only looks like a man. 

There’s another man, an actual human man, middle-aged and reminding her a little of her granddad around the face; he’s far gentler in the eyes and voice than her granddad ever was. Him she’ll talk to, until grey and sharp forces the issue with her name. He wants something, hungry for it the way that it seems everything here is hungry. The dark thing, oh, that’s hungry. And there are the shadows with their grievance that hangs heavy over the station, hungry for life and a better time.

She shuts her eyes a moment, and the blue wraps around her again, and when she opens her eyes it’s to stand under a summer sky. And there’s Sam, dear Sam. She remembers him when he was thirteen and her student. Continually late for school because there was always something better than spelling and arithmetic to be found in the hedgerows and the fields. All ears and elbows he was then, but he left school and worked on his uncle’s farm, and she’d see him now and again around the village, grown up into a fine, strong young man. When the big storm came and everyone worked to repair the damage, they were thrown together. He tended to the school, helped saw the broken tree branches and take them away, helped mend the roof and the broken window, helped her and the children dry out the sodden books.

A talker he was, if you chose the right subject, and the beauty of the land and its creatures was always right. His face glowed like a man seeing a vision of heaven. He promised her the sight of birds that she’d never see in the village if she came with him to his reed hide. So she packed the bread and cheese, and they watched the birds, so many of them.

He kissed her in that little reed hide, took her face in one hand and kissed her. Twelve years older than him, and she blushed like a schoolgirl and felt as giddy as one.

“I’ll come back, Ellen,” he said quietly at the railway station, her flowers in his jacket lapel. “I’ll come back.”

But he never did. Not to the birds, not to the Eastertide and its rare flower, not to her.

And now grey and sharp has what he wants, and that’s it, she can be sent on her way like it’s nothing. They send her back with a memory of the time before two appalling wars and the knowledge of too many young men who never came home. “Picking up gold and silver,” the children sing in her head, but she opens her eyes to a time long past that and the yellow and white of the daisies, while the Stationmaster hangs over her.

“You’ve had a nasty bang, Mrs Taylor. Are you quite all right?”

A nasty bang – yes, she’s had that. She’s landed across the fallen bicycle, and wrenched her arm. Her side is sore, and of course she’s ripped her stockings, which fact hurts almost as much as the physical pain. Stockings still aren’t easily come by and these are beyond repair.

“I came for Tom’s parcel,” she says dazedly. The sun is so bright, so warm, and she revels in it as if it’s been winter and it’s the first hint of spring instead of high summer. All her aches and pains, and she’s made a fool of herself falling over her bike, just a silly old woman, but oh, she feels like she’s made a lucky escape, dodged something with teeth in the dark.

The stationmaster picks her up and arranges for the grocer to give her (and her bike) a lift home, along with Tom’s parcel. A ten-days wonder and joke that is, the teacher taking a fall on her bicycle and not even riding it.

~*~

She’s lining the girls up, while the band gets closer and closer, the young men singing at the top of their lungs. ‘Smile, boys, that’s the style’. The girls are giggling and overexcited, clasping their buttonholes for the soldiers, and the air is filled with the scent of flowers. The young men arrive and line up. There are speeches and cheering, and the girls file up and pin the flowers to the young men’s jackets, fare-welling each of them with a little piece of home. Eleanor has a buttonhole in her own hand, she made it with particular care, but as she steps up to Sam it’s as if a shadow falls over the platform. The sunlight is gone, and Sam’s gaze is stony and as cold as the sudden chill in the air.

She pins the buttonhole on his jacket, and all the while he stares at her as if he hates her, as if what happened later is all her fault.

“I’m sorry!” she cries. She was just one woman in a little village, the Great War was none of her doing; but still she lives, and is part of this land and will be part of it after she’s dead and gone. Sam Pearce lies in some corner of a foreign field forever England, but not his home. Not ever home. How his mother grieved over that. How Eleanor grieved too. She wakes weeping and cold in her bed, Tom stirring beside her.

“Whatever is it, girl?” he asks, well awake. Girl he calls her, when neither of them will see sixty again and she reaches out for him in the dark.

“A nightmare,” she says, swallowing the sobs. Why now, she wonders. Why now? She’d wept tears enough all those years ago.

“Well, then, come here,” he says, and lets her rest her head on his shoulder until the worst of the dream is gone, and they both fall back into sleep.

~*~

“Here we stand on Tom Tiddler’s ground,” she sings softly as she peels potatoes, “picking up gold and silver.”

Tom comes up behind her. “Do they still play that?” he asks. “Or have you gone back to when you were a kid?”

“A bit of both. A bit of both.” She stares at the peelings in the sink. “What do you think of the idea of going to France? For a holiday.”

“A holiday is it? I don’t know that they’re set up for holidays yet, Nell girl.”

“I was thinking of visiting war graves,” she admits. “There’s Willy, and some of my students that never came home. The Soole brothers for a start.” Willy, Tom knows about, her cousin Willy. And there were the twelve village lads that never came home from this last war, let alone the First. But it’s Sam Pearce and the nightmares she can’t forget that drive her.

“France,” Tom says musingly. He likes home, does Tom. “I never did learn any French, you know. Unless we’re counting Mademoiselle from Armentière. Parlez vous?” He sings the last bit and Eleanor laughs.

“I know a little bit. Enough to get by.” It would be expensive, she knows that, but she’s overcome with the fierceness of the need. “We’d have to save up, but think about it?”

“Is this your nightmares is it?”

“Yes, yes it is. Some of those boys –nobody else remembers them now, or if they do they couldn’t get over there anyway. And I just find all of a sudden that I can’t bear it. Silly, I know.”

“Let’s see how this summer goes,” Tom says. “And then depending on the money and how you feel, we could aim for next summer. If your heart’s set on it.”

A year! A year seems so far away, and then suddenly it seems the only way. Perhaps there’ll be a pasch flower to pick if she searches hard enough, never mind the pain in her hips at the end of the day. It would be pressed and dried, but she could lay it down, faded purple among the red of the poppies. “There!” she’d tell Sam. “There’s your bloody pasch flower at last. Now let me be.”

“You’re a good man, Tom Taylor,” she says.

“Well, maybe I am at that,” he says with a smile. He’s nothing like Sam Pearce, this man she met and married in her fifties. He’s balding and comfortable and more interested in motors than the fields. He loves her, and she loves him.

‘If I pick you your pasch flower, will you let me be?’ she asks Sam and then puts thoughts of him aside. There’s the tea to be made for now, and next summer for France.


End file.
